Review: NIUSIA (Theatre 503)

Review by Ruth Sealey

⭐️⭐️⭐️

Heading into London on a day filled with protests, to review a play about immigration and the experiences of immigrants, felt strikingly timely, though also a sobering reflection of the UK today. At Theatre 503 in Clapham, NIUSIA is given a platform to explore memory, identity, and the stories left behind by those who came before us. But how do we hold onto stories when memories fade, details blur, and the people who lived them are no longer here to tell them themselves?

NIUSIA began its own journey in Australia in 2023, earning awards at fringe festivals in Adelaide before travelling to Edinburgh in 2025, where it continued to collect acclaim on the fringe theatre circuit. Told through the eyes of Beth, the play follows her exploration of family history, her Jewish identity and the memories surrounding her grandmother, Niusia. A survivor of the Holocaust, Niusia endured the Auschwitz concentration camp before building a new life in Australia. Yet this is not the version of her grandmother that Beth remembers: instead, her memories are shaped by seeing her in the final stages of her life.

Beth Paterson both writes and performs this one-act, one-woman production in her writing debut. Through deeply personal storytelling, she lays bare her emotions while piecing together the fragmented and often jumbled memories of her grandmother that remain after her death. Beth saw her grandmother every week until she died when Beth was just 15 years old, yet the play captures how unreliable memory can become over time. What Paterson’s writing does particularly well is reflect the fading and reshaping of memory and the difficulty of reconstructing the past when stories blur, details shift, and recollections become influenced both by time and by the people who continue telling them.

The story of Niusia is an extraordinary one, and the audience is taken through her life in Warsaw, her return to the Jewish ghetto to care for her father, her imprisonment in the Auschwitz concentration camp, and her forced work as a nurse for Josef Mengele, infamously known as The Angel of Death. One of the great strengths of Paterson’s writing is that it does not allow Niusia’s identity to be defined solely by the horrors she endured during the war. Instead, the play moves beyond survival to explore what came afterwards and the painful realisation that she could never return home, her decision to move to Australia, and the beginning of an entirely new chapter of her life.

It feels difficult to critique a play as personal as this, particularly when Paterson has chosen to lay herself so emotionally bare before an audience and explore a story so deeply connected to her own family history. Yet the fragmented nature of memory explored within the play is, at times, reflected in the structure of the writing itself. The production never fully settles on whether its central focus is Beth’s own journey of understanding what it means to be Jewish, or the life story of Niusia herself, and the narrative drifts uncertainly between the two.

Some of Kat Yates’s directorial choices do interrupt the emotional flow of the piece. Repeated breaks of the fourth wall become distracting, pulling attention away from the storytelling and feeling unnecessary in a production whose emotional core is already powerful enough on its own. While the inclusion of humour clearly aims to show that grief and memory are not solely defined by sadness, some comedic moments feel slightly forced and out of step with the surrounding material. Combined with the direct address to the audience, these moments do not always sit comfortably within the small performance space.

Beth Paterson delivers a strong performance throughout, at her most compelling when she simply sits with the audience and recounts Niusia’s past, reading from the notes and research that helped her piece together her grandmother’s history. In these quieter moments, the production feels at its most intimate and emotionally affecting. The only other voice heard alongside Beth’s is that of her mother, whose recorded audio is woven into the performance. In theory, this is an effective and thoughtful device, reinforcing the idea of memory being passed between generations. Unfortunately, the sound quality is inconsistent, and rather than deepening the emotional connection, it occasionally pulls the audience out of the moment.

The set design by Samantha Hastings quietly but effectively supports the storytelling. An empty armchair and vacant kitchen chairs act as constant visual reminders of Niusia’s absence, giving the stage a lingering sense of loss. The room is filled with stacks of books, making it almost impossible not to find yourself trying to read the titles scattered across the stage. The books begin to feel like a metaphor for Beth’s fragmented memories and attempts to piece together her grandmother’s story. As Beth repacks the books back into boxes, there is a sense that she is trying to bring order to those memories - carefully sorting and preserving them like an archive of a life that risks being forgotten. It is a subtle but thoughtful detail, and the attention given to the book titles adds another layer of depth and authenticity to the production.

NIUSIA is an intensely personal and deeply moving piece of theatre, even if some creative choices occasionally leave the production feeling unfocused. At times, the production seems uncertain of its own form, hovering between play, lecture, and intimate conversation, and this does not always sit comfortably within the small performance space. At its heart, however, it tells an important story about survival, memory, identity, and the fear of people and histories being forgotten. In a time when the lessons of the past can feel increasingly fragile, the play serves as a powerful reminder of why these stories must continue to be told and remembered.

NIUSIA plays at Theatre 503 until 23^rd May. Tickets from https://theatre503.com/whats-on/niusia/#tickets

Photos by Mayah Salter